SPRINGFIELD, Ohio —The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.

“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.

Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.

  • norimee@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    “I just wanted to be hateful and racist in private with my 500 Facebook friends. I didn’t want others to know that”

    Its the same as with this woman who sparkt the riots in the UK recently, by spreading false information she had from a russian bot.

    Actions have consequences. Even Facebook posts.